Left with a bitter taste

‘Dining at the upper tiers will never be cheap, but tasting menus have made great restaurants into luxury goods,’ writes Pete Wells.
Photo: Harvard Wang

by
Pete Wells

The shapelessness of certain tasting menus might be blamed in part on a broken feedback loop. A restaurant that sells appetisers, main courses and entrees quickly learns which ones customers like. But one-bite dishes rarely come back to the kitchen untouched, so the chef has little chance to learn what customers think. Asking “How was everything?" of somebody who has just consumed 27 items isn’t likely to produce constructive criticism.

These restaurants can deviate from old-fashioned notions of hospitality in other ways. Serving a hot meal has become increasingly a lost cause, given how quickly a morsel the size of a cat’s tongue will cool.

The strangest of all the anti-hospitality gestures, though, is the delayed-bread power play. For centuries, good hosts have placed bread on the table. New York restaurants Blanca, Momofuku Ko and others do the same, and their bread is often superb, but the meal is about half over before it appears. When I’ve asked about this, I’ve been told that the chef didn’t want diners to fill up on bread. When did it become a restaurant’s job to keep its customers from feeling full?

It’s rather unaccommodating when customers are giving up unusual amounts of time, control and, of course, money.

Dining at the upper tiers will never be cheap, but tasting menus have made some of the US’s greatest restaurants into luxury goods. A meal at the Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare is now $US225; it was $135 at the beginning of 2011. It’s true that chef Cesar Ramirez buys more expensive ingredients than he once did, but it’s also true that as accolades for the restaurant piled up, the number of seats stayed at 18.

A small restaurant serving a set menu to just a few customers each night can transcend the laws of restaurant economics. What is the value of 30 courses you haven’t seen? You’re not buying 30 courses, of course. You’re buying a ticket to a show that will probably sell out, which leaves the restaurant free to charge scalper’s prices if it likes.

It’s my job to urge readers to try the best, so I can’t feel good about watching great restaurants that were already serving an elite audience taking themselves further out of reach. And the elite who now fill these dining rooms are a particular kind of diner, the big-game hunters out to bag as many trophy restaurants as they can. Another kind of eater, the lusty, hungry ones who keep a mental map of the most delicious things to eat around town, may be left outside.

That’s one reason these dining rooms can feel less lively. A mono-culture of earnest foodies has replaced the old biodiversity in which senior partners taking out the sales team from Atlanta would sit next to couples on blind dates. You can’t eat a meal like this with a passing acquaintance since you’ll be together for hours, but you can’t go with somebody you really want to talk to, either, since there’s little time between courses for sustained conversation.

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Once in a while, I’ve had tasting menus so extraordinary that none of these things mattered. But the format presents formidable hurdles, enough to cause us to stop and wonder how many more meals like this we need. Not every novel should be War and Peace. Sometimes, enough really is enough.